Postmortem:<\/p>\n
So I feel fairly recovered from the weekend.\u00a0 I’ve played and reviewed a handful of the entries, and I’m pretty impressed by a lot of them.\u00a0 So, here are my postmortem thoughts on the whole deal.<\/p>\n
<\/span><\/p>\n I had spent about a week in the month prior to the compo dusting off my aging C skills in preparation.\u00a0 I should have spent more; once I got past doing the familiar my speed dropped considerably, and I lost a lot of Sunday to frustration.<\/p>\n Better sleep strategy.\u00a0 I got a decent 7 hours friday night, but saturday night was only about 6.\u00a0 Since I was extra-tired from coding all day, that 6 hours was not enough.\u00a0 Next time I should try for a little less sleep friday night, and MORE sleep saturday night, to refresh.<\/p>\n I had no food on-hand.\u00a0 Although most food places are very near the apartment, it still ate up two hours or so over the course of the weekend.\u00a0 I was planning on going to the store before the compo, but didn’t get the chance.<\/p>\n I didn’t have a clear goal for my game.\u00a0 I knew what elements I wanted to incorporate, but not to what purpose.\u00a0 I was aware of this the whole time, but I did not get to a point where I decided it was definitely a problem until it was too late to go with my backup plan.\u00a0 The result was an unfortunate deviation from my personal goal of Keep It Simple.<\/p>\n Sound.\u00a0 I lost a lot of motivation by sunday and just didn’t have the desire to add sound or music.\u00a0 I made a few effects that even shipped with the package, but are unused.\u00a0 Next time I’ll put some more early focus on this.<\/p>\n More Feedback. I had a lot of good prep-work done beforehand.\u00a0 I had a project backup system in place, a framework for the basic allegro system, Makefiles prepared, etc.\u00a0 This helped me focus on the GAME at the start rather than the tedious bookkeeping stuff.<\/p>\n I did manage to stay very focused for the majority of Saturday, which I’m proud of.\u00a0 Watching my timelapse I realize how few breaks I took during that first 24 hours.\u00a0 A+<\/p>\n I Actually Finished.\u00a0 This is big.<\/p>\n My graphics came out a lot better than I was expecting.\u00a0 They had a definite old-school PC RPG feel to them, like Ultima4 or 5.\u00a0 My Tower graphic is pretty rawkin’, and a definite highlight IMO.<\/p>\n After taking a day away from it and playing it again today, I feel that the overall concept has potential, if I get more concrete on goals.\u00a0 I actually had some fun playing it and trying to protect a town for as long as possible.\u00a0 I may revisit this concept in some form down the road.<\/p>\n All in all, an enjoyable experience.\u00a0 It definitely gave me the urge to make another game.\u00a0 That’s pretty cool!<\/p>\n \n Tags: postmortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"August 12th, 2008 6:31 pm","title":"WeatherTower post-mortem"}The General Could-Do-Better’s:<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Game CDB’s:<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\n I spent time making different states of decay for the towns, but not stages of growth\/decay for forests, farms, barrens and clouds.\u00a0 This would not have taken much extra time, and is a complete product of my laziness.<\/p>\n General Feel-Pretty-Good’s:<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Game FPG’s:<\/strong><\/h3>\n